Semrush SEO Crash Course | Lesson 4 | Build Backlinks to Your Site

Hey, what's up everybody. Brian Dean here and welcome to the fourth lesson of the SEMrush SEO crash course.

In the last lesson, lesson three, I showed you why publishing amazing content helps with SEO.

And how to use content templates that are specifically designed for higher Google rankings.

You also learn how to optimize that content so the Google can understand what your page is all about.

And in this lesson, lesson four, we're going to switch gears.

Specifically, we're going to cover what might be the most important part of SEO -- Link-building.

Now you may have heard the term link-building or backlinks before.

But what exactly are those things and how do you get other sites to link to you?

Well, that's exactly what I'm going to cover in this lesson.

Let's dive right in. So let's hop in your DeLorean and go back to the early days of the internet.

Back in the day, search engines like Yahoo and Altavista we're the dominant players and they rank their search results based a hundred percent on the content of a webpage.

In other words, on page SEO.

Enter Google. Their now

famous page rank algorithm changed the game.

Instead of simply analyzing the content of a page Google also looked at how many people linked to that page.

Each link was basically a vote for that page and the more votes a page had The higher it would rank. And they were right.

Nearly 20 years later, links are still the best way to determine the quality of a webpage.

That's why backlinks remained Google's go to racking signal.

Since then Google has made countless changes to their algorithm.

And they tend to now focus more on link quality instead of just link quantity.

But what does a quality link actually mean?

In other words, what types of links actually push your site to the top of Google? Well, as it turns out quality links have three feature.

that make them much more powerful than random links.

The first feature is the authority of the page and website that's linking to you.

Links from authoritative pages and websites pass more authority to your site, which tells Google that your site is now an authority too.

For example, getting a link from the Wall Street journal is going to send much more authority to your site than a random person's blog.

You can easily see how authoritative the site is in Semrush.

Just pop a URL into SEMrush and check out its authority score.

The higher this number, the more authority that site will send you via a link.

The second feature to keep an eye on when it comes to links is the relevance of the site that's linking to you.

Yes, as we just went over a site's authority matters.

But that sites relevance also matters.

For example, let's say that you run a website about the paleo diet.

And you get a link from an authoritative site about unicycles. Will that link still count?

about unicycles. Will that link still count?

Yes, but it won't be nearly as powerful as a link from a site about health.

That's because links from sites related to yours, pass more SEO value than links from sites in other industries.

Plus links from relevant sites show Google that your site is legit.

After all, it looks really unnatural for most of the lakes pointed to your yoga site to come from video game blogs.

You can see the category that a website falls under in Semrush.

Just enter the homepage of the site in Semrush and look at the backlinks analytics report.

Then you can see the different categories that a site falls under.

Now, to be clear, it's perfectly okay to get a few links from unrelated websites.

But you do want most of your links to be from the sites in your niche.

The last factor that makes up a quality link is whether or not it's editorially placed.

In a matter where your link appears on a page, you should ask yourself, was this link editorially placed.

In other words, did someone link to you because they thought your site was awesome?

If so that's an editorial link.

or did you create a profile on a random site and drop a link to your site?

That's really not an editorial link, as you might expect, Google puts much more weight on editorially placed links.

So then you habit the three features that make up a quality link.

The question is, how do you actually get those links?

Well, that's what I'm going to cover right now.

The first link building strategy I recommend trying is the skyscraper technique.

I've used the skyscraper technique to build backlinks from authority sites like entrepreneur.com The guardian and more.

And yes, you've probably noticed that they're all linking to this single piece of content.

That post is a piece of skyscraper content that's racked up hundreds of backlinks.

But more important than that, as you just saw, many of those links are quality backlinks from authority sites in my niche.

The question is "How can you do the same thing?"

Here's the step-by-step process.

First find a piece of content in your industry that's already performed well in terms of backlinks.

The easiest way to do that a simple Google search.

Just search for your keyword and check out the first page results.

As we just covered backlinks are a super important Google ranking signal.

So if a page is ranking on the first page of Google, lots of people have probably linked to it.

That's step number one.

Next, create a piece of content that's five to 10 times better than what you just found.

For example, with the post that I mentioned above, I noticed that most content ranking on the first page for my target keyword was pretty thin and not really up to date.

They also tended to like visuals and illustrations.

So I decided to create something that was 10 times better, which helped that page rack up a ton of backlinks.

Our next link building strategy is broken link building.

Overall, this is one of my all time favorite link building strategies.

Here's how it works.

First, find a page online that you'd like to get a link from.

Then use a tool, like check my links to scan the page for broken links.

Lastly, let the person that runs a site know that their page has a broken link.

And if you have a page on your site that could replace the broken link, suggest that they replace that content with the dead link.

So why does this work so well?

Well, most outreach emails ask for something, a link, a share a guestpost.

Without offering anything in return, but with broken link building, you flip the script.

Instead of only asking for something you offer help first.

Specifically, a list of broken links on someone's site or a specific page.

For example, here's the broken link building email that I recently sent out.

See how it offers someone help first then ask for a link.

That's why in this case, that person was happy to add my link to their page.

Our third strategy is to publish original data.

And industry studies now to be clear, this strategy definitely takes some upfront work.

But when done right, a single industry study can land you lots of backlinks. That's because with a study you're giving bloggers and journalists what they want.

Data that they can site in their articles.

In the articles. For example, here's an industry study that I published a while back To date, This post has racked up thousands of quality backlinks without me needing to do a lot of manual email outreach.

Now, compared to a list post or a guide, this piece of content was a lot of work to put together.

But considering that this post has picked up thousands of backlinks, so far I'd say that it was well worth it.

Next up, we have building links from on linked brand mentions.

Now every once in a while, someone will mention your site in a blog post or article, but they won't actually link to your site. Here's an example.

See how that person mentioned my site.

But didn't link to me. That's called an unlinked brand mention.

And these mentions are relatively easy to get backlinks from why?

Well, the author of the posts already mentioned you, which means that they like you.

So you just need to send them a short, friendly email like tihs.

Our last strategy is competitor analysis.

Here's the deal.

The strategies that I just outlined work in pretty much any niche.

That said every industry has its own wrinkles.

Which means that certain content types, topics and link opportunities can sometimes work 10 times better in one niche versus another.

which is why analyzing your competitors backlinks is key.

To do this pop a competitor into Semrush.

Then hit back link analytics.

This will show you all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Next scan, the first few pages of links and keep an eye out for any patterns that crop up.

For example, let's say the Iran a health and fitness blog.

And one of your competitors is nerd fitness.

Well, when you check out that site's link profile in Semrush, you'll notice that a lot of their links come from health-related podcasts.

So what can you do with this information?

First? It gives you an idea of what approaches tend to work best in your niche.

That way you can double down on it.

But you can also use this as a nice list of places that you can go to get links directly.

Now, obviously you'll need to reach out to the people that run those podcasts and pitch yourself as a guest.

Which takes work, but at least, you know where to start.

How about another example? When you analyze the link profile of this site in Semrush, you can see that a good chunk of their back links, especially authority links come from industry studies. Specifically,

industry studies. Specifically,

surveys, which again, gives you a specific approach to start on right away.

An approach that's already proven to work in your niche, which eliminates a lot of the guesswork.

Okay. So once you have your content ready, What's next?

Email outreach.

Now first, let me get this out of the way.

You've probably received your fair share of bad outreach emails before.

In fact, all of the bad outreach emails that are floating around probably make you wonder, does email outreach still work?

Now the short answer is yes, email outreach can still work.

The longer answer is that to get people to reply to your outreach today, you need to send the right types of outreach emails.

Specifically emails that don't make you look like a spammer that actually provide value to the people who are emailing and get the results you want.

In this case, backlinks to your site.

Fortunately, Semrush has a cool feature called link-building tool that makes us process a lot easier than doing everything manually.

Yes, you should still customize and personalize every outreach email that you sent.

But this tool could help speed things up quite a bit.

All you need to do is set up a project for your site and the tool automatically generate a list of link prospects for you.

You can also send outreach emails directly within the tool.

And with that, this lesson is complete.

To quickly recap, You learn that links are a must.

If you want to rank for basically any keyword in Google.

I also showed you a handful of strategies, like broken link building and competitor analysis.

To get started, looking ahead to the next lesson, lesson five, we're going to dive into tracking your SEO results.

In other words, now that you're putting all of these on-page SEO and link building strategies into practice, how do you keep track of what's working?

And what's not really making a dent?

Well, that's where SEO tracking comes into play.

And I'll see you in the next lesson.